Developer Diaries

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Developer Diary #1

Making the Ghosts -- Ubisoft's Pascal Lefort gets us up to speed in our first exclusive diary from the GRAW team.

Project: GRAW, a tactical-military shooter. You are the Soldier of the Future. You are in command of cutting edge military technology. You are the leader of the most elite Special Forces unit in the world, you are the Ghosts!

Welcome to the first of our Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter Development Diaries. We are in the final stages of polishing a truly Next-Generation Tactical Military Shooter that will give the player control of an incredible new range of military hardware and prototypes planned for 2013! We are eagerly awaiting the fans' reactions and hope they will get everything they were hoping for and much, much more! I'm Pascal Lefort, Character Designer on GRAW and I will show you some of the cool new gear we're giving you to try!

Keeping it Real

You wouldn't believe the amount of research, time, photos, traveling and skill that goes into reproducing the weapons, uniforms, vehicles and environments. We are constantly trying to improve the experience for players by giving them the most realistic entertainment experience you could imagine, and in order to do this, attention to detail is crucial. With the power of the Xbox 360 we were able to make the models more realistic and detailed than ever before as we had over 15,000 polygons per Ghost; if I remember correctly this was about the size of a whole map on an early PS1 game.

To ensure that we are using equipment that is realistic, we carry out an extensive research phase, where we talk to various military consultants, in the same way the film industry has advisors. This way we have an insider's view of realistic future developments and how they will be used to improve tactics on the battlefield.

Creating the Models

As this is a next-generation title we also wanted to give players the ability to play as the next-generation soldier; not sci-fi but the kind of soldier you will see on the battlefield in the next 10 years. The U.S. military and engineers have completely re-imagined the way we look at our combat forces. By thinking of the individual soldier as a system, and leveraging advanced technologies to improve that system, the fighting force man-by-man, is more responsive, more survivable, and more lethal than any existing force.